Collars (and chains) of our own making

So here I am, sitting in the airport, less than an hour from boarding my flight out of Dayton. I’ve been running like a headless chicken for at least the last couple of weeks, so I haven’t been able to do much for relaxation (last night’s City of Heroes session notwithstanding).

I’m remembering something that came to me one morning as I was laying in bed.

“You don’t need a collar to do my work. But you are already bound by a collar of your own making.”

It’s always interesting when God speaks. It’s sometimes painful. It’s like I’m a teenager in God’s family, trying desperately to do my own thing in my own way, when God wants what God wants. It’s like I’m the teenager who’s just been told by Dad that I “don’t need the car to go to work” (how many of us have had a similar experience).

As I roll the whole of that one around in my head, I have to think about how much I’m bound by my commitments. While I thought about it then—but never had time to blog it—it’s especially poignant now as I sit in the airport at the beginning of my journey to Iraq. I expect my deployment to be a good experience, but the fact is that, in volunteering for deployment, I’ve attached another collar (or chain) to myself.

We all have these chains, most of which we attach to ourselves—whether by action or inaction, or, as we confess in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), “by what we have done, and by what we have left undone” (BCP, 360). As I’ve written before (or you can no doubt gather from it), we commit an injustice against God when we allow ourselves to become so bound by these chains that God doesn’t fit in any more.

I think this is what Jesus hopes we’ll realize when he tells us that his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

Well, I guess I’ll have to work some more with this later on. It looks like they’re getting ready to board my flight…